The Research On Factors Influencing Customer Brand Loyalty In Shanghai Apparel Industry

As daily consumer goods, apparel has a large customer base and huge consumption. In addition, it is an intensely competitive industry. So it is meaningful for the enterprises in this area to have customer loyalty. In order to improve customer brand loyalty, managers need firstly to get the idea of what key factors to influence customer brand loyalty. This paper mainly study on the factors influencing customer brand loyalty through empirical research.In order to find the elements accurately and comprehensive, this paper at first summarized influencing factors as many as possible through literature review. Then the author screened these factors according to the character of apparel industry. After that the author asked experienced managers in this industry to filtrate the remaining elements and at last got the most important ten. Finally, it is empirical research. Questionnaire survey was conducted to get 243 samples data. In order to test the previous hypothesis, data analysis included reliability analysis, factor analysis, correlation analysis and stepwise regression analysis.As the research result of this paper, six elements, including corporate image, customer's attitude to self-image, service and related support system, advertisement, influence from related groups and promotion, are most intensive elements for customer brand loyalty. For these six factors, corporate image is the most important element. Promotion doesn't have notable correlation with customer loyalty alone. But at the effect of other elements, it has a notable influence to customer brand loyalty. After further study, if we divide customer brand loyalty into behavior loyalty and attitude loyalty, promotion has more influence to attitude loyalty then behavior loyalty. In addition, the other four elements, including product quality, customer's attitude of risk aversion, customer diversity seeking mentality and conversion cost, have no notable relationship with customer brand loyalty. But after further data analysis, we find product quality is also a very important element although it has no notable correlation with customer loyalty. All responses in the questionnaire survey, including brand loyalty consumer and non-brand loyalty consumer, consider product quality is very important. So it is a basic element now in the competitive industry. For the other three elements, it hasn't notable correlation with customer brand loyalty because of the industry characters.In order to expand research significance and its application, this paper did more study on marketing recommendation based on the conclusions of empirical research. On the one hand, it analyzed the main brand building problems of Shanghai state owned apparel companies. On the other hand, it studied from excellent companies about brand building experience. Combining the previous conclusions, several recommendations about improving customers brand loyalty are given.This paper has six chapters as a whole. Chapter one is instruction which is about research background and the purpose of this paper. Paper structure is also given on the first chapter. Chapter two is literature review. In this section, brand loyalty related factors which have been studied before are collected. It is the basis of this paper's study. In addition, brand loyalty related conceptions and evaluation of customer brand loyalty also studied on this chapter. Chapter three refers to the research hypothesis. The first job is to screen all related factors by author as well as experienced managers in this area. Based on this, ten research hypothesis and the conceptual model are given. Chapter four is the focus of this paper. It is empirical research, including questionnaire design, pre-survey, data analysis and hypothesis testing. For the empirical research results, this paper tried to give the explanations and research conclusion through further analysis. Chapter five is about the comparison analysis on Shanghai state-owned apparel companies and excellent companies. On the one hand, the main problems about brand building in shanghai state-owned apparel companies are digged out. On the other hand, the experiences are learned from excellent companies. Conbining with the conclusion of empirical research, some marketing recommendations are given. In the final chapter, it summarized this paper's conclusion and the main innovations. In addition, some flaws in this paper, as well as the directions of further research are given.